From Toddlerhood to TikTok: Growing Up with Social Media
Like most people my age, I am what’s known as a “digital native” — that is, I’ve grown up with digital technology. Navigating the digital world is second nature for my generation, because we’ve never known anything else. I was born in 2001, so I have watched technology evolve as I grew up. I have vague, distant memories of using a VCR, then transitioning to DVDs, and then to Blu-Rays, and now all of those are practically obsolete. I can remember a time when cell phones didn’t have cameras, and simply owning any smartphone was exciting. I have quite literally grown up with digital technology, and it has certainly shaped my life.
The main way that digital technology has shaped my life is through various social media platforms. Social media can be a controversial topic, and some people (especially older people) tend to see only the bad or only the good effects. Having first-hand experience with many different platforms has allowed me to see and understand both sides of the argument, and taught me that it is a nuanced issue.
Instagram was still relatively new when I was in middle school, and I remember my mom being concerned about its effects on young teens. However, after months of begging, she finally let me create one. I was thrilled, and commenced to posting anything and everything: pictures of me, my friends, my dog, restaurants I went to, movies I saw, and roughly a million pictures of Frappuccinos (hey, I was 14). Even so, I wasn’t just posting anything: every photo was carefully selected, cropped, edited, and filtered.
Looking at my friends’ feeds, perfectly themed and impossibly aesthetic, I began to post less and less, feeling like I never had cute enough pictures or clever enough captions to post.
Captions had to be created, hashtags chosen, friends tagged, and locations added before a picture could even be considered worthy of the ‘Gram. I never had a ‘theme’ for my feed, but I still deliberately curated my posts to portray the image of myself I wanted the world to see. At first, I tried to be more funny and ‘quirky’, yet still cool.
As time went on, I wanted to seem cooler, shifting from slightly strange shots with often unrelated captions to more artsy and cute snaps of me with friends. Looking at my friends’ feeds, perfectly themed and impossibly aesthetic, I began to post less and less, feeling like I never had cute enough pictures or clever enough captions to post. Now I almost never use Instagram: my most recent post is from Halloween of 2019.
As my insecurity drove me away from Instagram, I turned to a platform that didn’t require nearly as much effort: Twitter. Twitter’s text-based platform offered a way to share my thoughts without the need for a perfect picture to accompany them. I felt that there wasn’t as much pressure to post consistently, and since I barely had any followers, I was sort of able to use it as a way to vent my thoughts. Through Twitter, I also began to see and engage in more political discourse. While I initially joined Twitter in 2016, I wasn’t active on the platform until the fall of 2019, when I started college. As the 2020 election drew closer, I tried to be more politically active and informed, and started keeping an eye out for major political happenings. I would frequently check trending topics, and try to read up on those issues.
Even as I was becoming more active on Twitter, another social media platform was rising in popularity: TikTok. At the urging of my roommate, I decided to download the app, initially never intending to create content on it. Even without creating, TikTok had plenty of content to offer, presented in the form of a never-ending For You Page, which allowed me to scroll endlessly. Despite my initial intentions I began to post videos, fairly sporadically and with no real theme in mind. I gained a few followers, and had a couple videos crack 500 views, but I wasn’t really paying attention to the stats. As quarantine had progressed, I’d been posting more frequently, and my videos had been doing pretty well. On May 2nd, I posted another video — I hadn’t even put much effort into it, but to my surprise, that video got over a hundred thousand views and skyrocketed my follower count from about 30 to nearly 600.
TikTok fame is as fleeting as it is fun, however, and I’ve yet to come anywhere close to a video that popular since. Part of that is because I ran into the same problem on TikTok that plagued me on Instagram (lack of confidence), but part of it is straight-up laziness: I have no desire to post multiple videos a day, every day, in order to get famous.
As I’ve been re-examining my social media accounts, I realized that they each portray a slightly different version of myself. My Instagram account is like a time capsule of my middle and high school self; a little bit awkward, heavily filtered, and frequently shifting. My Twitter account is very different: I seem more confident, but also more pessimistic. My TikTok account is still another version of me — the K-Pop fan who occasionally attempts to dance. It’s not that I lie about myself anywhere, but I’ve realized that it is nearly impossible to present a complete picture of a person online.
